Hydrolix announces the appointment of Todd Persen as chief technology officer (CTO). 

Co-Founder Hasan Alayli assumes the chief scientist role to continue development of groundbreaking foundational technology.

This executive team change comes at a time of accelerated growth at Hydrolix. With revenue growing 8x from Q4 of 2023 to Q4 of 2024, Hydrolix grew its customer roster from 39 to 389, or an order of magnitude increase. The company also expanded its team from 50 to 135, and it plans to add another 100 team members this year, with an emphasis on building a Portland-based customer support team.

Hydrolix partnerships with Akamai and AWS have contributed significantly to the company's growth. Akamai uses Hydrolix's streaming data lake software as the engine for its managed observability service, TrafficPeak. In just nine months, TrafficPeak, powered by Hydrolix, generated eight million dollars in revenue and is achieving 12x year-over-year growth. Seventy percent of people who try Akamai's TrafficPeak buy it. Likewise, AWS offers Cascade, powered by Hydrolix, a fully managed SaaS solution that gives AWS CloudFront and WAF users turnkey observability for real-time logs. Cascade is available in the AWS Marketplace.

Todd Persen was previously the CEO and co-founder of Era Software, the creator of EraSearch, a cloud-native storage product for petabyte-scale log management workloads. When Era Software was acquired by ServiceNow in 2022, Persen joined ServiceNow as the group product manager for the log management capabilities of ServiceNow Cloud Observability. Persen's prior positions include co-founder and CTO of InfluxData, and observability lead at Pivotal Software. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Central Florida and an MBA from the University of Florida.

Hasan Alayli is a co-founder of Hydrolix and previously served as its CTO. His work experience includes positions at Splunk, Cedexis and Cisco Systems. As chief scientist, Alayli will oversee Hydrolix's long-term strategy for innovation, burgeoning portfolio of patents and research activities.

"I am excited that Todd is joining us at a pivotal moment in the life of our company, as the Hydrolix technology has found a foothold in the market and we're growing at a tremendous pace," said Alayli. "Having someone of his caliber to partner with at the senior leadership level unlocks enormous potential for the company. His strategic leadership will be invaluable as we build a robust tech team, scale our technology infrastructure, and architect a roadmap that addresses the needs and opportunities in the market."

"The problem we set out to solve at Hydrolix is one that more and more organizations face," said Marty Kagan, co-founder and CEO at Hydrolix. "Our product is now in hundreds of production deployments supporting some very large customers running critical workloads, and the results have encouraged us that the time is right to press the accelerator and push product innovation even further. Adding Todd to our team not only increases the depth of our technical leadership but allows Hasan to focus his visionary talents on driving continued technical innovation to fuel our growth for the long term."

"I've been eagerly watching what Marty and Hasan have been building at Hydrolix for years, so I jumped at the chance to join to help them build something lasting and substantial," said Persen. "They anticipated that the number of enterprises generating vast amounts of log data was going to rapidly expand. That's precisely what's happened, and Hydrolix is the only player with a solution that not only works at massive production scale, but it does so through connectors and integrations that preserve technology investments and architectures already proven for these organizations. Our priority going forward is to develop product line extensions that open new markets and use cases for the core technology."